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Trouble Every Day This art house horror movie is stunningly shot and performed with the kind of angst you'd expect from noirish French cinema, but even a cursory glance at the plot reveals it's little more than a b-movie, albiet in a sumptious disguise.
The wild-haired, Rasputin-like Vincent Gallo plays Shane Brown, a scientist, visiting Paris on honeymoon with his new wife, June (Tricia Vessey). Unknown to his new wife, he is trying to track down a fellow scientist, Léo (Alex Descas) who together with Shane were performing experiments in Africa trying to isolate the Human libido.
The monstrous result of these experiments is the creation of cannibalistic sex maniacs, only interested in tracking down members of the opposite sex and then devouring them messily during the act of intercourse. Shane, who obviously took part in the experiments, is struggling to contain his blood-lust with a regimen of drugs and tablets, but his head is filled with nightmarish fantasies and he understandably shrugs away from consummating his marriage.
Worse still, Léo’s wife, Coré (played by the voluptuous Béatrice Dalle) has been reduced to a savage animal, who continually escapes into the night to attract lorry drivers to devour. Her husband seems to spend all his time catching up with her, burying her victims and then gently, lovingly, wiping the blood from her body.
It's an interesting, if absurd premise, but Claire Denis’ trademark long silences and minimal dialogue reduce rather than enrich this drama and the result is rather vacuous and unfulfilling. The ideas and morality are not explored and the movie is left full gratuitous images of blood and naked flesh.
There are moments where the movie descends into unbelievable stupidity. For example, Léo, who tries to keep his wife locked up in her room, leaves a fully-functioning buzzsaw under the bed! No wonder she keeps escaping and you begin to wonder if the expressionless Léo actually likes this macabre game of chase.
That's not to say that Trouble Every Day is devoid of stunning images: the scene where Béatrice Dalle devours a young local lad who has broken into the house is genuinely disturbing as she nips at his face and plays with chunks of flesh, drenching the room in an amazing amount of blood.
But sadly, this doesn't stop Trouble Every Day being a confusing, pretentious mess. Similar themes can be seen much more successfully in Abel Ferrera’s The Addiction (1995), Antonia Bird’s Ravenous (1999) and almost the complete oeuvre of David Cronenberg!
Trouble Every Day just goes to prove that long, meaningful silences can actually be masking an underdeveloped movie, and don't automatically equate to hidden depths. This movie is surface gloss and nothing more.
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